Grupo Vilar Riba is engaged in global consultancy services for tax, legal, consulting, auditing, and labour companies. It is based in Vic and has offices in Barcelona and Puigcerdà, it comprises more than 130 professionals with 30 years of experience in the sector.
The company has long been committed to providing the best possible solution to its customers’ needs. Besides, they were aware that important notifications represented a potential point to find a more effective response to what they had at that time. All these communications were sent by traditional burofax before using Lleida.net’s service.
As soon as they started using Lleida.net email, their processes improved significantly, and most of the problems they were facing with the burofax were sorted out.
Jordi Pallarès, Legal Chief Officer, and Moisès Aguilar, a lawyer working in the labour department, share their experience with us.
Challenges faced before adopting Registered Email
The challenges of delivery
One of Vilar Riba’s main concerns before using Lleida.net’s electronic notification service arose when one of its customers needed to send a notification to one of its employees. It was paramount for it to arrive on time. “The problem was that we could not guarantee the date on which the worker received the burofax,” Moisès explained. “For example, in a dismissal, if the burofax took a few days to arrive, the worker was notified of his dismissal by the SMS message sent by the Spanish National Social Security Treasury (Tesorería General de la Seguridad Social). Yet, he had not received the letter of dismissal from the company”.
Since the date of the notification did not correspond to the date on which the company adopted the decision, it caused them problems more than once. At that moment, they decided to look for an electronic communication system to replace the bureaufax.
The decision-making process for using Lleida.net service
Vilar Riba was looking for a solution not requiring technological implementation. An external solution through a portal or an email system, such as the one offered by Lleida.net, was their preference.
The most critical factors for Vilar Riba were
- Flexibility in the contracting of services.
- Ease of use.
- Technical reliability of the system.
- Cost-competitiveness.
- Ensuring legal validity.
“We particularly loved the ease and agility of contracting the system and its credit-based use. In other words, you top up some credits and start working without too much training, without any specific software installation or technical complexity”.
Jordi Pallarès and Moisès Aguilar shared with us how the speed of receipt of the documentary evidence, along with the full content of the attached documents within the documentary evidence itself, were among their favourite features of the service, as much as the legal guarantee underpinning these communications.
The process of implementing Registered Email
Speed in opening communication
Before they started using Lleida.net’s electronic certification service, they wondered to what extent sending an email meant receiving a response accrediting that the recipient of the document had received the message on time, and even if the message had been opened.
“One of our main concerns was how long it would take from the time the notification was sent to the time it was opened, and the solution met our expectations: in about 80% of communications, we receive the opening addendum in2 hours. In short, it is consistently faster than burofax. This speed astonished us.
Today, most people have their email set up on their mobile phones to access notifications takes very little time.
Lleida.net service implementation
For Vilar Riba, the implementation process was smooth, and four people participated in it: “I would say that within 24 hours we had everything ready to start working with Registered Emails”.
They find it an easy-to-use solution as it is streamlined in 6 steps:
- You open a new regular email.
- Add the recipient.
- The communication is pasted into the body of the email.
- If you need to attach documents, attach them in PDF or the corresponding format.
- Only this step is different from sending a regular email: you have to add the registered email address provided by Lleida.net to the Copy field, and that’s it.
- Send and wait for the certificate to arrive.
What Vilar Riba’s clients have to say about the service
Vilar Riba’s clients were initially a little reluctant to trust that a Registered email would really be as valid and legally sound as a burofax.
But they solved it with a bit of educational exercise to generate trust, to explain that a registered email is not a regular email, that a trusted third party is involved in the process (in this case, Lleida.net), which performs the task of certification by issuing the corresponding document, and this is what gives the registered email the reliability it deserves.
” After that, this hurdle is overcome in 99% of cases, there is a confidence in the system, and once used, I would say that customer satisfaction is absolute,” said Moisès.
Legal processes
As for legal processes, since they use Lleida.net, notifications are no longer a source of doubt because, in the vast majority of cases, the date of notification, the date of receipt and the date on which the decision takes effect are the same.
Not only do they save resources, as it is already an issue that will not be argued and therefore does not need to be worked out, but it also gives them and their customers extra peace of mind, knowing that the user has been correctly notified in due time.
Reducing costs and improvements
Improving internal processes
According to Vilar Riba, the impact of electronic communications on internal processes has optimised the time spent on notifications and on monitoring the receipt of notifications.
Using registered email, the process is generally concluded the same day it is sent. However, when sending paper bureaufaxes, it was common to find that the addressee was not at home when the postman arrived, and therefore the mail was sent back to the office. Sometimes this happened even on a second attempt, where the delivery could not be completed either. The person who managed the delivery had to keep track of it daily and check the corresponding web page to see where the burofax was and whether it had been delivered or not.
These were very lengthy processes that could take a week or even longer. Therefore, the control part of this work has changed for them, mainly because delivery has been considerably shortened, and they no longer need to check whether the receiver has received the communication successfully.
“Avoiding the risk of the notification not being considered successful was critical for us, but even at an internal process level, avoiding the week-long management of this was also a significant change,” says Moisès.
Highlights of Registered Email
A particular aspect that they wanted to highlight in the interview was the design of the documentary evidence. For them, having the content of the email attachments within the documentary evidence without performing any additional action stands out as a remarkable point.
As for statistics or metrics, they particularly valued two factors:
- The communication time, which has been significantly reduced.
- Cost, significantly cheaper than that of a bureaufax.
” We feel these are two essential aspects, and the improvement is quite visible. It’s not an issue of short margins, but it means a huge improvement for us.
Who would you recommend Registered Email?
On being asked if they would recommend these services to other companies, this was their response: “We recommend certified email as a useful tool for any professional company seeking to make communications ensuring their receipt and facing the scenario of having to prove this communication to anybody in any jurisdiction”.
Furthermore, they told us that beyond their sector, they also found the tool helpful as an internal tool in human resources to notify their employees in the same way.